Two Cambridge academics, the historians Nick and Sarah Mallinson, take a sabbatical with their three small and lively girls in a remote Languedoc farmhouse. But the farmhouse contains its own histories, far darker and murkier than the Mallinsons are used to dealing with. As the illusion of Eden retreats, the couple begin to feel the vulnerability... more...

Jack Middleton, once 'England's most promising young composer' now lives comfortably in Hampstead with his wife Milly, an heiress. Jack is no longer young nor has he ever quite fulfilled his remarkable promise. And then he visits Estonia, in search of inspiration, and falls for a young waitress, Kaja. Six childless years on and Jack and Milly's marriage... more...

Set in 1968 in the Parisian suburbs, No Telling is narrated by twelve-year-old Gilles as he approaches his Solemn Communion, puberty, and some sense of the chaos around him. His home is deeply dysfunctional: a dithering mother, a hard-drinking, womanising uncle who becomes his stepfather, and an older sister, Carole - an unbalanced revolutionary... more...

It is April 1945, and the historic town of Lohenfelde is about to be overrun by the Allied Third Army. Huddled in the vaults of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Museum are Heinrich Hoffer and his three colleagues. Their petty rivalries and resentments surface quickly in this claustrophobic confinement as the four prepare themselves for their fate.
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Celebrated as a novelist of breathtaking historical range and depth, Adam Thorpe is also an accomplished and celebrated writer of short fiction, and the stories collected here show his deftness with character, his enormous versatility of voice.
In the title story, an expectant first-time novelist meets the publisher who has asked him to... more...

Adam Thorpe's fifth collection finds purpose in the discarded, the secretive, the failed. Juxtaposing creation and destruction, hope and grief - a small boy deep down a lead mine; an unlit, nocturnal path set against the 'insomniac' motorway; industrialised apples against wrinkled windfalls - his poems argue for bewilderment and 'the slight bruise... more...

Who was Robin Hood? Romantic legend casts him as outlaw, archer, and hero of the people, living in Sherwood Forest with Friar Tuck, Little John and Maid Marian, stealing from the rich to give to the poor - but there is no historical proof to back this up. The early ballads portray a quite different figure: impulsive, violent, vengeful, with no concern... more...

' outwardly the unfilmable script of a would-be English cineste, one Richard Arthur Thornby currently lecturing in Texas on the cinema. He airs a hypothetical movie of both his own American present and his middle-class English families past. . ' John Fowles more...

Hugh Arkwright's remote childhood in the Central African bush, and its sudden disruption, leaves him with a legacy of magic, mystery, and tragic loss. Late in his life, he returns to the gaunt house in Ulverton where he was brought up by his eccentric uncle, and finds that the old ghosts still walk. The more he excavates his own past, the deeper he... more...

The poems in Adam Thorpe's latest collection are concerned with the continuum between two worlds: the lived present and the felt past. With the attentive care of an archaeologist he uncovers and examines fragments - from a personal history or the historic past - and rebuilds the narrative: a fossil in Hitler's stadium, a wedding photograph, marks... more...